Gun Types
by Ivory Novelist
Summary: An angst piece on Doc Roe. Please read and review. Thank you.


A/N: Another piece on Roe. I felt bad and in the same moment, he came to me. And he put me in the Zone. I felt this. I felt him. I felt nothing because he feels nothing. It was great.

Please Read and Review. Thank you.

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Gun Types

Doc Roe sat alone in the snow and listened to the distant shooting. If he closed his eyes and tried, he could make it sound like something else. Something unfamiliar. Like home. Or music. Or a woman's heels clicking on the floor. These things are unfamiliar. These things are damn near foreign. And he didn't know how to handle them. He decided not to change the sound.

It almost sounded like rain tapping on a window. His eyes were open. He couldn't hear himself breathe. He stared but he didn't see anything. Like Blithe. He still hadn't forgotten Blithe. The man had seen though. And that's why he'd gotten shot. Doc Roe decided he didn't want to see. He suspected he never had, since D-Day. His hands worked. He didn't have to think. He had it memorized. His hands had it memorized.

He didn't shiver. Maybe he should worry about that. Maybe it was unhealthy – not to shiver. Especially when he was in the middle of Bastogne. Was he even cold? He didn't feel like it. But he must be. Everyone else was. But he didn't feel it. He wasn't wearing the jacket that so many of the other men were. He was numb. They said that when a man gets hit, he goes numb for the first few seconds. Maybe that was it. Maybe he was hit. Maybe he was bleeding. He looked down.

Clean snow.

But his finger – his finger had started to bleed earlier. Too cold to stay in his skin. His blood. Maybe it was searching for the humid Louisiana nights in July. Maybe it was searching for whiskey.

Since when did he drink? He couldn't remember.

The sounds didn't stop. He could almost hear the faint echo of a man's voice, a scream. He didn't look down at his fingers again. He didn't move his eyes. He already knew about the falling snow and the red cross on his bag. He didn't need to look at them again. He didn't need to see.

He needed to feel.

He didn't feel anything. He was empty. He was blank. And he was fucking tired of it. He was never afraid, he was never upset, he was never lonely. Even his private smirk, evoked by listening to the men joke, was shallow. And whenever he listened, he sat apart from them. Always apart. He slept in a foxhole with Spina or by himself. Sometimes, he didn't sleep at all. He would walk – or he would go from hole to hole, checking on everyone. When he wandered in the forest, he didn't even remember it afterward. He would come back and have no recollection of the stroll.

He couldn't remember the last time he'd eaten.

He remembered fried chicken and potatoes and gumbo from home. But he didn't know what it all tasted like. He didn't know what anything tasted like. What was taste anyway?

Closed his eyes. Maybe he could taste the snow. No, he didn't have the will to stick out his tongue. Maybe he could taste the cold. No, he didn't think so. And even if he could, he wouldn't know it. He didn't know how to define anything. He didn't know how to tell himself why snow was snow or what cold meant or why the cross was red instead of blue.

Because blood turns red when it oxidizes.

He remembered that.

He once thought about what could happen if he cut himself in attempts to see blue blood. No one had ever seen it. They said it was blue because of the way veins look under flour skin. But they had never seen it. They had no solid proof. He wondered if it was true. But then he decided that cutting himself up wasn't right. And so he put that thought away.

When Martin rushed through the trees, he got to his feet and said something but didn't know what he said. The others started coming from behind Martin, and one of them took a hit. Roe rushed to the man's side, just as he always did, and let his hands go through the motions. The soldier was out of it in moments. Roe couldn't remember sleep.

But a day or two later, he found it again. He slept alone in a half-finished foxhole, no cover at all. He didn't care if the snow buried him. He lay unmoving, arms folded in the absence of a gun. He never carried his gun around here. He never seemed to need it. He looked dead, lying in that hole. And when the noise started again, he didn't wake up. When Welsh took a bullet in the leg, he didn't hear the screams. He slept. He didn't dream. He didn't know he was sleeping. It was pseudo death.

Winters jolted his body like electrocution. Roe woke up. He wasn't fast enough. Winters was yelling. Roe couldn't understand. But he stood up and he grabbed his bag and he started to climb out of his hole. Winters was yelling the kind of yell that came when it was a friend who had gone down. Roe still didn't notice that it was Welsh screaming near him. His hands found the morphine and stuck one in the flesh. Some kind of bandage wrapped around the bloody mess. Welsh was gone before Roe could look. The noise stopped.

And when the town took a bombing and he found the cathedral aid station in ruins, when he picked up the purple headscarf from the ashes, when he rode the jeep back to Easy Company, he thought about how perfect his hands really were for a gun. The blood had softened them. They would fit on a gun like velvet. His fingers were the right size for the trigger too. And for a silent, secret moment, Eugene Roe decided that a black pistol would slide into his mouth like nature.

Not a Luger, though.

Lugers killed men like Hoobler.

Virgin American pistols killed men like Roe.

And it was almost poetic.

It was almost red cross perfect.


End file.
